DIes Irae isn’t making this easy for the anime only watcher, as we get confused montages of Lisa’s backstory and oddly of a character whose relevance doesn’t come till a much later date. I would say it’s rather spoiler-ish if the info wasn’t presented in such a haphazard way that no one could really decode its contents. I will leave Rens dream for another time and instead let me lay out Lisa’s backstory so that the events of this episode start making some kind of sense. Put simply, Lisa isn’t like the other members of the Obsidian round table who primarily specialize in offense. Instead Lisa’s role in the group was running a special kind of orphanage, one dedicated towards human experimentation. The goal was the creation of a Ubermensch, otherwise known as a superhuman being, so the children in this orphanage were genetically altered to gain psychic powers and trained in them. Thing is that such genetic alteration didn’t come at a cost as the children all died at young ages which Lisa deeply regrets. However she continued her horrific experimentation because at the end goal she could wish all the dead children back to life.
All these experiments where to ensure that when it came time for Lisa to give birth that all the factors would be optimal and she would birth the child that would power Reinhard’s giant gold death castle. She succeeded in birthing that child but managed to have twins, one the genetic abomination that grew fast into adulthood and one completely normal child unaffected by the experimentation. Lisa ultimately decided to hide the existence of the normal child and sent them away while sacrificing the altered child to Reinhard. The normal child grew up in Japan, got married and had Kasumi while Lisa took care of her other granddaughter Rea. Thus due to circumstances both Kasumi and Rea are suitable to be sacrificed to bring Reinhard down to the world. Lisa wants to sacrifice Rea and get her wish so she can bring back all the children she has killed to get to this point while Kristof wants to sacrifice Kasumi in order to save Rea’s life. There is also a number of underlying motivations here like Lisa being terrified of Reinhard which causes her to shun both Johan and Rea due to them reminding her of the man she slept with. Likewise Kristof currently inhabits the body of Reinhard and he in turn wants to prove whether his love for Rea is genuine or some paternal instinct of the body he inhabits.
We also have Kei admitting that she’s doing all this to bring back her loved ones while Rin points out the simple truth that if bringing back someone was that easy then they wouldn’t be truly precious in the first place. Kei is also Shana now can goes all flaming hair red eyes and i must admit that my attention span is slowly drifting away. Kei can basically be considered a protagonist due to her different roles in the Visual Novel and as I mentioned before, the protagonists of this story are not very interesting. Even looking at the above paragraph I wrote goes to show just how complex and nuanced the villain’s motivation is when compared to Kei’s shortsighted and childish desire. Even Marie here just goes and points out the obvious detail that ever since Reinhard stab his big spear into her, shes started feeling feelings she never felt before. Is it bad that she got something good from an evil persons actions?
Afraid I don’t really care all that much because I don’t really understand how getting stabbed gave her emotions in the first place. I admit that this post has more or less been an explanation of the episode itself rather than a review of it but truth be told I don’t particularly have any real thoughts on the episode. Partly out of apathy and partly cause the Dies Irae kickstarter has once again screwed up and left me feeling rather irritated with the company that made it. I can’t say my impression with Light as a company is a positive one considering how rather slapdash this adaptation is and the handling of the Visual novel kickstarter. Well I suppose I got to read this story, even if getting it was harder than it needed to be and this anime did at least get some people to check out the source so it at least accomplished something. Well next episode we get get to see the first of the big three enter the scene with Balalaika impersonator Elenore.
